Summary
Vladimir Putin told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that NATO must accept “new territorial realities” in Ukraine as a precondition for peace talks, reiterating claims that NATO’s “aggressive policies” and disregard for Russian security interests caused the war.
Scholz condemned Russia’s aggression and called for troop withdrawal during the call, which has drawn criticism from Kyiv.
Ukrainian President Zelensky warned the talks could ease Putin’s international isolation without altering Russia’s stance.
A Western diplomat suggested Scholz might leverage the call domestically amid Germany’s upcoming snap elections.
Maybe my reading comprehension is failing me here, but where’s the ultimatum? He hasn’t made any demands with a specific time limit and repercussions if Scholz didn’t meet them. He has only stated his preconditions for peace talks.
The subtext here is brutally simple: Putin knows Trump is willing to withdraw from NATO, taking 70% of its defense budget with him, if Putin’s demands aren’t met. At that point, NATO becomes little more than letterhead, and new territorial “realities” manifest regardless of NATO’s protests. Putin’s saber-rattling serves a calculated purpose–he knows the actual foundation of NATO’s power is already compromised through Trump.
Expect this antagonistic posturing from Putin to increase. Trump is already looking for an excuse to leave NATO, and his staff have outlined the executive branch’s unilateral power to do so. Putin’s role, which he’s gleefully accepting, is to provoke NATO into actions that will give Trump his justification for withdrawal.
The withdrawal seems nearly inevitable at this point, especially given Trump’s planned purge of military leadership. While the EU is attempting to plan for this contingency, losing 70% of your military strength is essentially an insurmountable problem for a coalition that has structured its entire defense strategy around U.S. backing.
The numbers here are stark: the U.S. spends four times what all EU member states combined spend on military funding - not just NATO allocations but total military spending. This creates an irrefutable power imbalance within the coalition. When Trump previously threatened withdrawal, NATO’s attempts to develop alternative deterrent strategies went nowhere because the EU simply cannot afford to compensate for a U.S. exit. They essentially did nothing and hoped Biden’s election would solve the problem.
This allowed the EU economy to avoid difficult choices, as making up for a U.S. withdrawal would likely destabilize the European economy. But now they face an impossible dilemma: attempt to compensate for U.S. withdrawal and risk economic crisis, or maintain current spending levels and leave member states critically exposed. Many NATO states, like Estonia, have defense strategies that amount to “try to survive for two weeks until NATO arrives.” Putin understands the leverage he’s gained through Trump and the Republican party’s capture of the federal government. It’s tremendous leverage. The EU should be in crisis mode, but they seem unable or unwilling to fully grasp that U.S. withdrawal from NATO isn’t just possible but probable.
Pay attention. The tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting beneath our feet.
The EU is plenty strong enough to defend itself – and Ukraine – against Russia. Several times over. Without switching to a war economy. Your maths fall flat once you realise that much of those 70% are aircraft carries in the Pacific and random research projects into fusion or whatever, utterly irrelevant to the question at hand.
On the contrary without the US in the game expect Poland to put boots on Ukrainian soil pretty much instantly, and that’s after the rest of the EU convinced them to not march straight on Moscow.
🤣
Good luck, I hope you’re right.
The ultimatum is give him whar he wants or else he’s going to keep sending his military age men to get blown up by Ukrainian drones.
I think his bucket of military aged men he’s willing to sacrifice runs low, he’s been sending their fathers for a while.
And the least effective reddit trolls, don’t forget.
It’s kind of a Russian tradition to throw every person at a conflict and hope it works out. During WWII they had more people than guns, but people got sent out anyway
It’s straight from Zapp Brannigan’s Big Book of War
The title is quite misleading. Scholz is leader of a NATO country, but it reads like an ultimatum was issued to the leader of NATO, which Scholz is definitely not.
Scholz is barely the leader of Germany. But at least we’ve got rid of the FDP.
The actual leader is Bernd das Brot.
The ultimatum is to finally ban Newsweek for the complete gutter trash it is.